Most importantly, though, it is over.
The project itself, I have to admit, was actually interesting to me. Most people (including me, guilty as charged) usually skim until they find what they need or just use the handy dandy Ctrl+f when sifting through research for papers like these.Maybe it's an appreciation of other works due to my own interest in writing, or maybe all the rhetorical analysis is growing on me, but I found myself actually fascinated by the ideas pointed out in the literary criticisms.
Interest abruptly turned into frustration during the compilation of sources into the huge tangled web of ideas that became my paper. It was extremely difficult to figure out how to convey all these complicated and intricate ideas in a simplistic and understandable way -- to sort out the jumbled mess in my head and somehow make it make sense on paper.
The trickiest part, though, was getting it all done in such a short amount of time. The week of the due date was some serious red alert, this-is-not-a-drill, super crunch time. Cranking out an outline, rough draft, and final paper -- seven page paper, mind you -- in the span of seven days had to have been a new personal record. I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders after pressing the final submit button to turnitin.com and thus ending the traumatic sequence of events that was my research paper.
When it was all said and done, and I could look back on my paper without bitter feelings of resentment, I felt a sense of accomplishment. I went from tentatively figuring out what an annotation was to busting one out in a matter of minutes. I became a whiz at MLA citation. I wrote by far my most complex and sophisticated paper and realized how far I have come -- even the difference between my research paper last year and this one is astounding. Since I thought I had it all figured out in 7th grade, I am excited to see my writing continue to improve in leaps and bounds.
